So, I'd half-started this piece already and turned out the Countryside Ride Jam. And it turned out fairly nifty. All... ehrm.. maybe 10-15 of the people who listened to it so far liked it quite a lot.  But I still had an ABC file with a lead line and chords and thought it would be pretty cool to actually finish the piece I'd intended to write but accidentally didn't.  So... in the week or two between when I'd finished the last piece and now, I generated this piece.

I'd been pondering the merits of writing a slightly longer instrumental thematic piece... and after some pondering, I decided to go for it. So I took the state of the wind sound at the end of Countryside Ride Jam and set that as the wind state at the beginning of this piece. I'd also decided that, since I'd already used the birds, that I wouldn't have an extended intro in the same fashion.

Now, writing it, I'd kinda started out wanting to write something that descends. I'd initially been thinking of descending like in Take The Pill by Emilie Autumn, but then I'd kinda extended that. And so I started pondering the notion of writing something that was natural and human and stuff at the start, but then transitioned into being robotic, like both sides of the Butlerian Jihad from Dune. I re-arranged sections a few times before getting the order of the piece where I'd wanted it to be.

Now, the lead sheet is two pages of notes with chords notated above it. But I started hearing that it starts out with a guitar. So I decided to play the first few bars on the guitar, then switch to a keyboard. I decided that the most efficient way to do this was to convert my ABC score to a GNU Lilypond score with the provided abc2ly tool and then use Lilypond to generate tabliture. And I found that, while it was playable, it was actually a good finger exercise to play it on the guitar because I tend not to generate guitar parts on anything other than a guitar.

I also rapidly discovered that, even though I prefer the form of tabliture that has standard musical notation above the tab lines, it was distracting to see that while playing on the keyboard, so I wasted some paper to have multiple versions of the score.

And, finally, I realized that I'd never used the metronome button on REAPER and that it would come in really handy given that a decent sized chunk of the song has no drums.

There are a few ad lib sections. If I were to print a score, I'd have no choice, because hitting a note and then diving up and down an octave while whanging paramaters around doesn't fit well with standard notation. The ending is entirely inspired by hearing Holy Ghost! play live.

As I wrote, I kinda changed it from the more unpleasant war between robots and machines and more into an Alice in Wonderland theme. I'd also accidentally realized that it was half-time in the start before switching to double-time towards the end. And I'd also realized there's at least three more pieces to follow, of which I've got parts of two more written

Much to my amusement, this piece uses double-time and has a drop, just like dub step.  Yet is not at all dubstep.

I'm continuing my love of TAL NoiseMaker on this piece. It is seriously an amazing tool with amazing built-in presets. So there's footsteps and robots hovering in the air and little blips of robotic static. And some harsh treble roboticy sounds that I'd long wanted to accomplish but couldn't figure out how until more recently. I also used my new sampled drum kit that has both a set of 4 roto-toms and a set of 7 regular toms.  And the usual suspects otherwise... StringSynth and xoxos nature effects.  Oh, and did I mention double-tracked electric guitar?  Yes, I did already.

Also, as usual, even though I could have just dragged-and-dropped the MIDI file that ABC generated into the synth lanes.... everything was played live.  

I kinda switched between recording the lead lines and then building up the sonic effects and then back to the lead lines. I think it's arguably a bit eccentric to have so many atmospheric effects in a piece. .. but oh well.

Descent into the robot factory

I started this on Saturday the 7th and finished it on the 11th.  Which includes compulsory breaks so I can evaluate the comped vocals impartially and working on other stuff.  Like, I worked *fast* on this one.  Started with the half-time tom-and-backbeat cadence and went on from there.

It's... um... completely different from the Instrumentals or most other stuff I've posted.  But I suspect you can hear my characteristic synth treatments all the same.  It's just that I kinda figured I'd go to town on making it sound harsh and brutal instead of lighter and pretty.

Because... ehrm, it's a creepy not-very-happy song.  I can't explain really what happened.  It just appeared in my head, piece by piece by piece until it was done.  I didn't write anything down, just played everything live.  It's not a true story.  It's probably not about what you'd necessarily think it's about.  But it's based on my not-entirely-pleasant worldview and deep dark secrets I carry about things that really did happen.... and my most recent lyric-writing technique has been to work on the lyrics until they upset me and stick in my head and then hope that some semblance of the emotion will be heard in the song.  And I actually did take some specific words and phrases and make them more ambiguous.

It's a vi-IV-I-V chord progression (the "Sensitive Female Chord Progression") in C for the verses, a I-iii for the chorus, a I-iv for the bridge, and then a bit of a ii-V-I turnaround towards the end.

The vocals were triple-tracked as per a recent post in /r/WeAreTheMusicMakers that was conveniently posted after the compulsory overnight delay between when I record my own vocals and when I try to comp them.  And I decided that since my voice is not nearly harsh enough, I ran them through a distortion filter to give them the EBM Industrial vibe.  Like, I tried, knowing that running your vocals through a guitar distortion pedal (or in my case, a simulated distortion pedal VST) was totally cliche... but I think the sound I was hearing in my head involved distortion.

TAL NoiseMaker for the bass line and one of the lead synths, PISScutter by NOVAkILL for another of the lead synths, and my guitar which was done up in an approximation of Van Halen's Brown Sound, except using VST effects instead of real hardware.  Everything played live-ish, no loops, no autotune.  I used both an SM57 and an MXL V67 for the vocals.

I think I like it.

The taken (demo 1)

I wanted to break somewhat from the patterns of the previous two pieces, both being reasonably fast pieces with a similar-ish ordering. If I were to be doing a proper symphony, I'd have a proper structure. But since I'm just writing a loosely-related set of instrumentals... well, I figured it needed at least one good Adagio section. And it's hard for me to get myself to write adagio sometimes.

It's a little more psychadelic and ambient than previous works.  And I kinda intentionally kept it a bit short.

What happened was that I was unable to find any good open-source Windows notation editors, didn't want to deal with ABC, and got frustrated and wrote things with pencil and staff paper. I mostly notated two things. First, I took some of the lead lines from Countryside Ride Jam and notated them in a different key... and then I worked out the chord inversions so I wouldn't play straight stacked chords but have more of a symphonic movement of notes. Furthermore, I'm using sixth chords and ninth chords and they sound great if you put them in a nice inversion but can be kinda awful sounding if you try to put them in the stacked standard form.

I guess I could have just copied the note data and worked out the chordal movement inside of the MIDI editor for REAPER, but I'm stubborn and wanted to actually play all of the pieces.

So the entire notated sketch fits on a single piece of staff paper. Only 5 staves, three containing the lead lines from Countryside Ride Jam that I'd just improvised, and two containing the movement of notes so that there's that lovely choral/orchestral feel to the synth-strings.

Just as I'd took the state of the wind sounding from Countryside Ride Jam and started Descent Into The Robot Factory with that wind sound... I took the wind sound at the end of Descent and started Adagio with it. Plus I took some of the sound effects and repeated them in this piece. And then switched to some different sounding patches otherwise to add some sonic variety. 

So, a bunch of TAL NoiseMakers, some SampleTank for the piano and subtle string flourishes, and xoxos wind.  I didn't use StringSynth this time.

There's at least two more pieces to go....  This one leads directly into the next piece.

Robot Factory Adagio

So, GameOfBands on reddit, round 2.  The assignment was to make a piece that builds to a climax.  Thankfully, none of us wanted to put in a sick bass drop.

magikker did the lyrics, while playing banjo.  I wrote the music part of things making it sound fairly metal, and then digitalskyfire did the vocals and mixed it and made it sound a bit more M83 and a bit less 80s-hair-metal.

The song goes through multiple tempo changes and multiple key changes.  The ii-V-I turnaround is your friend.

It literally started with a hi-hat ostinato that gets moved to other instruments throughout.  There's.... 4 guitars (2 of them using a particularly twisted digital emulation of EVH's Brown Sound), a bass guitar, 2 StringSynths, and 1 TAL NoiseMaker in there.  And I can't take too much credit for the way it sounds because digitalskyfire did a bunch of magical stuff to it to make it sound even better than it sounded when I was tracking.

magikker won for best lyrics.

We raised the flag

So, I wrote this in the span of about 80 minutes or so while on CalTrain using NanoStudio and my iPad.  It's a bit more quantized than I'd have liked and I think that my sense of 'feel' comes out better with real keys... but it's not bad.  I grabbed some samples live using the iPad mic.

And I kept it short, because long improvised synth jams tend to get too indulgent.  I'm just demonstrating that there's more to the iPad than surfing the web.

Best best best feature of the iPad is being able to have X-Y control pads for things.  That is so unbelievably handy.

Express to Sunnyvale

Please vote for us on the reddit GameOfBands: http://www.reddit.com/r/gameofbands/comments/w60a8/official_voting_post_for_rgameofbands_round_4/c5ajncb

I did the music, itsthegrizz did the vocals (And mixed it down) and then apropos_pentameter did the lyrics.

I'm continually amazed at GameOfBands.  It's been stiff competition each and every time.  This round's theme was to write a song based on some culture's mythology.

After Round 2, I've been more than a little obsessed with the notion of adding dramatic change and climax to my music. Also, after Round 2 where digitalskyfire replaced all of my drum samples with his drum samples in the mixdown, I decided that I needed better drum samples.

I did play the drums live on my drum pads. I think that it's far far far more important to actually trigger drums with drum pads or keyboard keys than it is to actually have a real drum kit.

For some reason, when we started talking about Greek Mythology, I kept hearing flutes. So I wasted a lot of time with various combinations and permutations of flutes and harps and bells and stuff until I kinda reached this point... one concert flute and one alto flute. And I used samples for those instruments, but I did play everything on my MIDI controller.

If I had a few thousand dollars lying around and more time than I've got, I'd totally buy myself a bass flute.

There are also 3 crunchy electric guitars and 2 clean electric guitars. There's doubletracking and sometimes I just put three different guitar parts in there all at the same time. Plus the electric bass.

This tune is the story of Oedipus and Jocasta... and every time the chorus comes around again, Oedipus's thoughts become more chaotic, which I tried to support by starting out with friendlier flutes and then transitioning almost entirely over to the electric guitar.. and not only that, but using some dissonant quintal chords on the last chorus. I've been starting to be a bit influenced by Paul Hindemith, mostly because his harmonies and theories on harmony still preserve the notion of a tonal center that the serialist people who have been ruining modern classical music don't like to have but without being stuck to more standard classical harmonies.

The problem with reading too much Hindemith is that he's just out there enough that sometimes people go "What the %#!#? I can't figure out what chords you are using‽‽‽" and it sounds fine to my ears so I start to wonder if I'm too egocentric to point out dissonance in my own work.

And also... again, since itsthegrizz is an experienced mixer, I had him do the final mix instead of doing it myself and therefore he added his own unique magic to the track. Also, he just went to town on the lyrics, adding his own melody there.

One closing thought: The other night, after a few too many drinks with my music ringing in my ears, walking the street, I thought I saw Oedipus. I said "Hey, Oedipus. W'sup, motherfucker?"

Leaving Jocasta

I was depressed and unhappy for no really good rational reason, so I took a walk. And I was thinking, the whole walk, about the symbolic nature of fairy wings, and the symbolicness of having one's fairy wings taken. If you were to meet a fairy and rip their wings off, would they grow back? Could they be put back on? What happens to a fairy when they can't fly anymore and have to walk?

And then I'm done with my mind-clearing walk, sit down in front of my computer, and see a link on some page somewhere entitled "The dream is a lie."

And then, 15 minutes later, I have the lyrics done.

So, this song is about a fairy having their wings stolen. Or about some point in the future long ahead and some asshole sees a stack of slides in a thrift store that happens to be mine and decides to make the ultimate kitschy lightshade, even though at there will probably be a point in the future where they discontinue the last color slide film (a point which I'm hoping happens sometime after I have a chance to live a long and healthy and photogenically fishnet-filled life) so some asshole is making a kitschy lightshade out of stuff that they aren't making anymore. And, mind you, if you make a lightshade out of slide film, eventually the image will fade.

On the same subject: If you see Kodachrome slides, treasure them. They do not make any more Kodachrome anymore.

But after I'd written out the lyrics, I was feeling better. Much happier. Sometimes it works much better to let the muses run their course.  It is a sorrowful song, but sorrow and alienation and not quite living up to your dreams is part of life.

As far as the music goes, I'm trying to get a set of music that's in the same vague genre as The Taken, without having every song sound alike.  And so I ended up consciously avoiding certain patterns.  I took a lesson from how well We Raised The Flag went with digitalskyfire muting my parts that I kept asking myself "Hey, if I mute that, will it make the song sound better instead of worse?"  I feel that the intro / verse / outro sections are very much driven by the keyboard, but the chorus is very much guitar-driven, but when I got to the solo part I felt that I'm too resistant on having electric guitar atop electric guitar for solos, so I used the piano instead.

Not counting muted tracks used to store good-but-not-quite-good-enough vocal bits, there's 39 tracks in the REAPER project, after all of the routing, splitting, etc. are done.  Thankfully, REAPER doesn't have artificial limits on the number of tracks you can have.

There's some StringSynth action, a TAL NoiseMaker for the bassline during the chorus, violin and viola and piano samples from my SampleTank, and a bit of Camel Audio Alchemy Player.  Plus my bass and guitar.  I also ended up using the iPad Alchemy app to control my performance.  So this is very much trying to pull out all of the stops.  I actually played the synth bassline instead of using an arpegiator.

I'm feeling better about my vocals and vocal production technique.  I'm still kinda fighting with what it means to be angry and sing.  If I try too hard to scream, I loose my intonation and I'm not too thrilled with it.  In The Taken, I mostly leaned on using distortion like industrial acts.  Here, I found that I'm getting better at making my voice naturally angry, but I felt that adding a controlled amount of distortion in the vocal channel gave it some nice bite.

Lyrics

The dream is a lie (demo 1)

So, grahamlester did the lyrics, I did the music, and gb2ktn did the vocals.

The required theme was "Pop clichés (from any decade)".  Which meant that grahamlester went in the 60s direction for the lyrics and I instantly wanted to go glittery and campy and 80s.  And I also felt like giving my guitar a rest and so the instrumental parts are all keyboards and my bass guitar.  Actually, the bass guitar really drives the piece.  And I tried to play up the 80s-ness with subtractive synths and reverb on the drums and stuff.

There's three vocal tracks, but gb2ktn is fairly precise in her singing.  She gave me two octave ranges for the vocals and I thought she sounded better doing a low Lady GaGa styled voice, although I added some of the higher octave back for the chorus.

It's a dramatic departure from the dark and depressing feel that I usually give my music these days.

Lyrics: 
Now Kim she’s just so elegantly curvy
A masterwork of silicone and art
But though she’s got his head all topsy turvy
Her own is just as vacant as her heart
A neurosurgeon needs to give her dome work
She doesn’t know a circle from a square
She makes her little brother do her homework
I’ve looked into her soul – there’s nothing there!
 
My baby doesn’t know that he’s my baby
My baby thinks that he’s in love with Kim
But I don’t care how mesmerized he may be
I’m gonna have a word or two with him
 
My baby he’s a most romantic treasure
He’s princely in his body and his heart
A paragon by any sort of measure
It’s destined that we two must never part
And Kim she has no right to come between us
Although I’m not too sure he knows my name
She’s just a slut dressed up to look like Venus
My heart’s ablaze with true love’s raging flame
 
My baby doesn’t know that he’s my baby
My baby thinks that he’s in love with Kim
But I don’t care how mesmerized he may be
I’m gonna have a word or two with him
 
Now Kim, she doesn’t even love her mother
It’s harsh but, yes, I know that for a fact
She’s just the sort of girl they ought to smother
The only thing that Kim can do is act
She had him in her trap first time he kissed her
It breaks my heart to know she wears his ring
And even though she is my older sister
She’s gonna find out that don’t mean a thing.
 
My baby doesn’t know that he’s my baby
My baby thinks that he’s in love with Kim
But I don’t care how mesmerized he may be
I’m gonna have a word or two with him

My Baby Doesn't Know

So, magikker did the lyrics, I did the music, and pzer0 did the vocals.  Now, magikker and I have worked together before; we made the unusually epic track "We raised the flag" where he won on lyrics.  And it's pzer0's first round.

It's also the first round with my TX-81z.  There's a bunch of tracks using various TX-81z patches, including one of my own creation, one StringSynth, and some sampled drums.  Plus a single guitar track.

There was no theme this round, so I ended up explaining to magikker the vague plotline of the science fiction books I'm reading (the In Her Name redemption trilogy) and that's what he wrote the lyrics around.

Voting link: http://www.reddit.com/r/gameofbands/comments/120zi7/game_of_bands_e3r2_official_voting_thread/c6r8kgk

Lost... (GameOfBands Epoch 2, Round 3)

It's not.... quite finished.  Our vocalist got really sick, I've got bronchitis... and that damn zuthulu guy made the theme compound time and lyrics that don't rhyme.

So this is the first time I've really tried to write in compound time... it's 7/8.

So this is me singing, while I've got bronchitis.... because I didn't see any leftover male vocalists and was less sick than the assigned vocalist was.  I had a span of an hour or two, buoyed with lots and lots of tea, where I could do it.  And then my entire upper register (Which I didn't know I had until fairly recently) went away and I had to be happy with the takes I had.  And I probably should have spent more time on everything, but... like I said.... Bronchitis.  Thankfully the music was all done over Thanksgiving.

So this would be vocals and music by me, lyrics by all_aflunters.

Lyrics:
You were the one thing
That held me
Together
And you’re the last thing
I’d ever
Destroy

The life I left
Behind me died
They’ve broken all the chains
That kept you
Beside me

Ripped apart
Torn away
I reach, I reach
For the empty air
Who am I fighting for?
What am I bleeding for?

It was a long time
Of losing
My way
A million and one miles
Before I
Was found

But a piece of me
Did not survive
And make it to you
It’s buried
And broken

Ripped apart
Torn away
I reach, I reach
For the empty air
Who am I fighting for?
What am I bleeding for?

You were the one thing
That held me
Together
And you’re the last thing
I’d ever
Destroy

Broken

So, most recent solo synth-and-guitar exploration.  I think I'm mostly working on the aesthetic for my music.  I think it's the tempo changes, the progression of sounds, the riffing, and the combination of guitars and synths and effects for the guitars.... there's.... a bunch of TAL NoiseMaker synths in there, some guitars, and the famed Babyface TX81z LatelyBass sound (He had two of them listening to the same channel, slightly detuned from each other... I just use a pitch shifter effect to do basically the same thing)

I'm pretty sure that the blue dress referenced in the lyrics is the same blue dress from the Depeche Mode tune.

Make me feel again (demo 2)

I play guitar, bass guitar, and keyboards.  I can even manage to play drums (although I'm far better at faking it on my keyboard's drum pads than I am sitting at a real kit)

I've gone through industrial, industrial metal, metal, new wave, electropop, progressive, techo, grunge, and fuck-it-all-I'm-doing-nothing-with-music kicks over the years.

I was a bedroom computer-centric musician since before most of the world had thought such a thing possible.  When Apple IIgs computers with Ensoniq chipsets and Pentium 200 computers with AWE64 Gold soundcards weren't charmingly retro.

wirehead

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks